Indicators continue to show novel coronavirus is easing...

1of3A young girl peers out the window of her vehicle while wearing an emoji pattern mask during the San Antonio Food Bank drive-through food distribution event April 7, 2020 in the Toyota Field parking lot in San Antonio. Mayor Ron Nirenberg and County Judge Nelson Wolff are urging San Antonio area residents to continue wearing masks and maintaining a 6-foot social distance from others when out in public to prevent a resurgence of the deadly novel coronavirus.Photo: Josie Norris /Staff Photographer

2of3Homemade face masks for sale blow in the wind outside of a business in San Antonio on May 12. San Antonio continues to encourage face masks or coverings as well as social distancing in an an effort to fight the coronavirus pandemic. (AP Photo/Eric Gay)Photo: Eric Gay /Associated Press

3of3A couple wearing face mask for protection from the coronavirus take a selfie at the Alamo in San Antonio, Wednesday, May 13, 2020. The Alamo remains closed to visitors due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Mayor Ron Nirenberg and County Judge Nelson Wolff are urging San Antonio area residents to continue wearing masks and maintaining a 6-foot social distance from others when out in public to prevent a resurgence of the deadly novel coronavirus.Photo: Eric Gay /Associated Press

A San Antonio land developer who recovered from a mild case of COVID-19 advocated Sunday for an experimental blood plasma treatment process that is the subject of a study led by the Mayo Clinic.

Paul Basaldua, who has emerged as a crusader for the experimental treatment after a week-long battle with the virus, said a single bag of “convalescent plasma” has the potential to save five lives.

He has donated 12, 200 milligram bags of plasma since recovering in the third week of March.

“Everything’s anecdotal at this point, but the best success story is that the first three people in San Antonio who received plasma were in really bad situations, on ventilators and with life-threatening cases, and all of them were out of the hospital within two weeks of receiving their plasma,” he said at Sunday’s daily city-county coronavirus briefing.

Basaldua, who grew up on the city’s West Side and is a graduate of St. Mary’s University, spoke at the briefing alongside Mayor Ron Nirenberg, County Commissioner Justin Rodriguez — who filled in for County Judge Nelson Wolff — and Elizabeth Waltman, chief operating officer of the South Texas Blood & Tissue Center.

At the start of Sunday’s briefing, Nirenberg noted the availability of staffed hospital beds and ventilators in San Antonio remains high, at 33 percent for hospital beds and 78 percent for the ventilators.

“This is a measure of the hospital’s stress score,” the mayor said, “our ability, our capacity to treat folks who are ill with COVID-19.”

The number of people with COVID-19 who were in the hospital increased slightly from 66 Saturday to 70 Sunday. Of those people, 31 were in intensive care and 16 were on ventilators to help them breathe.

Another 18 patients were under investigation, a slight increase from Saturday, the mayor said.

The number of COVID-19 patients in the ICU and on ventilators Sunday was down from late last week. The high mark this month for those in the ICU was 44 just one week agowhile 27 people were on ventilators last Wednesday.

Nirenberg said coronavirus case counts were highest on May 1-2. On those days, local officials saw more than 100 new cases before things slowed. That trend shifted, however, with increases over the past two weeks which he said were directly connected with universal testing at nursing homes and the Bexar County Jail.

Meanwhile, the positivity rate continues to be low, which is another good sign, he said. The week ended at 4.3 percent and is at 5.5 percent overall since the first case of COVID-19 was reported in San Antonio in mid-March.

“The number of COVID-19 positive tests as a percentage of total tests is starting to drop significantly,” Nirenberg said. “It’s half of what it was in April when nearly 10 percent of all tests were coming back positive.”

No new numbers on positive results were available Sunday or Saturday. Nirenberg said the Metro Health data team was taking a much-deserved weekend off. The figures for each weekend day will be announced Monday.

No new deaths were reported Sunday.

Gov. Greg Abbott has scheduled a news conference at 2 p.m. Monday to announce the reopening of other businesses, as he continues to phase in a restart of the Texas economy, ravaged by restrictions implemented in March to slow the spread of the virus. Statewide, more than 1,300 people who tested positive for the disease have died.

The death toll in Bexar County has been at 62 since Friday.

In an interview with the San Antonio Express-News earlier Sunday, Nirenberg said it was important for government leaders to be guided by public health priorities. That, he added, “doesn’t appear to be happening writ large for the state, and frankly, for the country. But where we are locally and where other communities are with regard to the containment of the virus puts us in a position of control.”

While he hopes that continues, Nirenberg went on to say “the problem is the effects of the governor’s decisions to open things up will not be known until two and three weeks after they’re made. And that’s why it’s so important that people continue to heed the guidance of our public health professionals that we’ve articulated every day regarding physical distancing, wearing a mask, protection of vulnerable members or our population, etc.”

The idea of using the blood plasma of COVID-19 survivors got traction in San Antonio after Dr. Pedro Lucero, a pulmonary specialist, began treating a coronavirus victim at Methodist Hospital | Stone Oak.

His patient, 47-year-old Jimmie Hayden, had been admitted there in early April with respiratory distress and had been on a mechanical ventilator to breathe and given a high level of supportive care.

Determined to save him, Lucero got approval from the Food and Drug Administration to use convalescent blood to transfer antibodies from recovered patients into those who were actively ill.

Hayden, the first patient to get the treatment, began receiving plasma April 9 and began to improve over the next few days and was well enough to get off the ventilator in less than a week. The therapy has been used to treat coronavirus patients elsewhere, including in Houston, Galveston and the Dallas-Fort Worth area.

Though Lucero has cautioned that it’s too early to know if the process worked without more data that would come from a large, randomized control study, Basaldua has become an outspoken proponent for the experimental therapy.

In an analysis he sent late last week to Nirenberg, he said his goal is to bring business and community leaders, and state leaders, perhaps, to encourage the Mayo Clinic to release the data it has so far accumulated on the treatment or find a way to get the information from local hospitals. Basaldua said he doesn’t want information about patients, other than how many of them received the plasma therapy and how many of them survived.

So far, neither the Mayo Clinic nor local hospitals have released the data.

Basaldua has said the Mayo Clinic, which is sponsoring the plasma donation program that BioBridge and South Texas Blood & Tissue Center (STBTC) is a part of, eventually will release its findings. But he also wrote of his fear “that it will be several months or a year from now and that plasma will not be used to its full potential with regard to providing a ‘bridge’ to the vaccine.”

He noted in the analysis that the first clinical study, done on 5,000 plasma recipients, found that 4,051 were severe or life-threatening COVID-19 cases when they received plasma. The study, released Thursday, https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.12.20099879v1.full.pdf, reported that the other 949 had a high risk of progressing to life-threatening cases and 3,316 patients were in the ICU.

Basaldua said in the white paper that fewer than 1 percent of the recipients had serious adverse effects and the mortality rate for those given the plasma was just under 15 percent. He went on to say the study found that percentage not excessive “because these patients were already in bad shape with accelerated COVID symptoms and multiple comorbidities prior to receiving plasma.”

The mortality rate, he added, falls if patients are treated prior to admission to ICU.

At Sunday’s city-county briefing, Basaldua outlined how recovered COVID-19 patients could give plasma at the South Texas Blood & Tissue Center, which will host a blood drive May 21-23 at the Alamodome. To qualify as convalescent plasma donors, those who’ve tested positive must have recovered and be 14 days’ removed from the final day of symptoms.

“The process takes about an hour and it’s made very easy by a very well-prepared staff at the South Texas Blood & Tissue Center, and just to give an idea of what the impact could have is every bag of plasma can go to 1.25 people, so if you can donate four bags you can save potentially five lives,” he said.

Sig Christenson covers the military for the San Antonio Express-News and been with the paper since 1997. He was embedded with the 3rd Infantry Division during the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and has reported from Baghdad and Afghanistan seven times since.

A Houston native, he covered the Branch Davidian siege, the 1994 Pensacola abortion clinic shooting, the 2003 space shuttle breakup over Texas, the 2009 Fort Hood shooting and its subsequent legal proceedings, as well as hurricanes, tropical storms and floods since 1986, among them Rita and Katrina and Maria.

Some of his projects include “Witness to War,” a special section recounting the invasion and early occupation of Iraq, and “The Only Retreat,” a three-part series detailing the only U.S. defeat during the invasion.

He’s won awards from Hearst Newspapers and the Associated Press, including Texas APME’s Specialties Reporting category in 2008, and was named “Reporter of the Year” by his peers in 2004.

A graduate of the University of Houston, he is a co-founder, former president and former board member of Military Reporters & Editors, established in 2002.

For a look at his work over time, see www.sigchristenson.com E-mail Sig at saddamscribe@yahoo.com